Several Restorative Naps at Spirit Rock

The evening of the day I returned from the hospital, temperatures were near freezing—65 or below. Tom and I huddled together on his small couch with a fleece blanket draped over our knees, clutching large mugs of hot tea to try to keep frostbite at bay.

After a whole week of not sleeping well followed by my night in the hospital, during which my self-image changed radically if temporarily from “perfectly healthy” to “invalid,” I was feeling a bit vulnerable. Tom said I was welcome to sleep over, but I suggested we both sleep at my place, platonically speaking, of course. (One does not necessarily trust the freshness of the bedding of the confirmed bachelor.)

He said, “Oh, very comfortable!” when he sank onto the McRoskey, and in the morning, he reported that he’d slept “very well.” He went off beaming, and with a spring in his step, but then, that’s how he always is.

Not so Hammett, who had the worst night of his life: another man came and slept in his half of the bed, right in front of his disbelieving eyes. I heard a couple of sounds in the night that made me think he was trying to shred Tom’s sweater, bunched up on a chair, and around 6 a.m., he meowed for half an hour, plaintive cries that got louder and louder.

Then it was quiet, but when I got up, I found him concealed in his most secret hiding place, burrowed under two or three layers of blankets on the back of the upholstered chair. I’ve never known him to go there when I’m home, though I sometimes find him there when I get home from work.

I think that when his loud laments failed to scare Tom from the apartment, he concluded he was dealing with a much more formidable enemy than he’d at first thought and prudently retreated.

As for the gastritis, two seconds after I took Pepcid, as directed by my doctor’s office, the pain went away, and when I quit eating so much vinegar, the pain stopped arising at all.

When they said in the emergency room that they were going to admit me, by the way, my first thought was that this evening of entertainment was starting to add up, monetarily, and when I discovered I was being admitted to a private room, I thought, “Uh oh, this looks expensive,” and I asked, “Is this going to cost a fortune?” A nurse answered airily, “Do you have insurance? It will probably be covered.”

In the end, it was pretty near $11,000—the ambulance ride alone was $1,000—but indeed my insurance did cover almost all of it. If I hadn’t had insurance and if I worked at McDonald’s or had no job, that could have been a major financial crisis, and so it seemed a bit irresponsible of the medical personnel to be all, “Let’s do this test! Let’s do that test! Stay overnight!”

But upon further reflection, I decided that that was much better than if they’d said at every turn, “Can you pay for this? Are you positive you can pay for this?” That would make people reluctant to seek care. Or then again, maybe it was simply a matter of CYA, as Ann, Tom’s mother suggested—avoiding liability.

The following weekend I went by myself to see the musical Wicked, at the Orpheum, which was pretty good.

The Friday after that, I went to hear Jon Kabat-Zinn speak at the Unitarian Universalist church at Geary and Franklin. I’d read his book Full Catastrophe Living about 20 years ago and liked it. I wanted to hear him speak because I’d liked his book, and I also thought it would be good to get an extra bit of inspiration before my annual meditation retreat began two days later.

This was a concentration retreat—samatha practice—the only one Spirit Rock offers each year, and I was looking forward to at least a moment of blissful tranquility. I did generally feel calm, but most of all I felt sleepy, and I slept, and slept, and slept, and slept. Some days I went back to bed after lunch and stayed there until dinner. It was very nice, but maybe not necessarily what I had gone there for.

I had a room on the back side of my dorm. Out my window I saw trees and a little stream, and heard the wind rustling the leaves and deer nosing about. Toward the end of the week, I got a bit concerned that I was doing it wrong, or wasting my retreat, and I had an an hoc meeting with one of the teachers, who said maybe I needed all that sleep. He added in firm tones that “Gandhi, the Buddha and Mother Teresa put together couldn’t have done any better.”

One thing of immense value that occurred was an exceedingly clear look at the workings of my mind, a tour of my thoughts in detail that made it glaringly obvious how much misery is self inflicted. It's also very impressive how the mind can create an entire vivid world full of convincing color and detail in no more than two seconds.

Since coming home from this retreat, I’ve found it almost effortless to notice what I’m thinking after a moment or two rather than after two hours or two weeks, and to let the stories go, not that the next story doesn't arise a split second later.

Another good thing happened at this retreat which was that there was a woman there with a very pleasing swagger—an obvious swagger is a good thing for a woman to have; few do—who turned out to be my across-the-hall neighbor, which I didn’t figure out until maybe one or two days before the retreat ended.

We talked at the end of the retreat and it turned out that she lives in San Francisco and that she is participating in an ongoing class at the San Francisco Zen Center which is about integrating meditation practice with daily life.

That sounded really great to me, so I called the Zen Center and asked if I could join late, and was allowed to; so far I’ve been to one class meeting. I’d never been to the Zen Center before. It has a very nice, tranquil atmosphere. I will enjoy going there.